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Chris Aronson, who was let go as Paramount’s head of domestic distribution last year, has filed a lawsuit accusing the company of reneging on an agreement to pay him $1.3 million. Aronson was fired as part of the executive shakeup that followed the Skydance merger. Shortly before the deal closed, he signed an extension that would have kept him on through December 2028. According to his suit, filed in L.A. Superior Court, Aronson should have been fully paid out for the remainder of the deal. But Paramount took the position that it could only pay him for two years, leaving him $1.3 million short of a full payout. The suit argues that Aronson, then 69, was wrongfully fired in part due to his age, and replaced by a much younger executive. The suit alleges that workers 55 and above have represented a disproportionate share of the recent layoffs. Paramount hired Shaun Barber, a top distribution exec at Lionsgate,

BookTok sensation Alex Aster stepped away from the worlds of her bestselling “Lightlark” and “Starside” novels this week to celebrate the debut of her new book, which is based on IP that predates her works by more than six decades: Barbie. Author Aster, who has now released 10 titles over the past six years, was brought on by Mattel to write “Barbie Dreamscape,” the first-ever YA series based on the beloved doll. And Aster says she was given creative freedom to do what she wanted with everyone’s favorite pick icon from the start, including deciding what other members of Barbie’s world to include. “Obviously, Barbie was always going to be the main character,” Aster told Variety during an interview at Tuesday’s “Barbie Dreamscape” release-day party at the Barnes & Noble Bookstore in Union Square, New York. “I wanted Ken to make an appearance, but I didn’t want it

The 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival top brass handed out the prize winners on Friday night (August 21), with Sandra Wollner’s Everytime and To Hold A Mountain from Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić earning the Heart Of Sarajevo narrative and documentary feature awards, respectively. Everytime (Austria-Ger) wins a €16,000 award and To Hold A Mountain, which is elieigble for the best international feature film Oscar after it won the Sundance World Cinema Documentary Award in January, collects a €4,000 award. Ana Urushadze won best director and a €10,000 award for Supporting Role (Georg-Est-Turkey). Eva Kostić was named best actress and collected a €2,500 prize

This story originally ran in “Sketch to Screen,” an animation newsletter. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox. 2026 has been a year where small films have broken out to become major box office phenomena. “Obsession.” “Backrooms.” And now, a new movie that most Americans definitely haven’t heard of yet has emerged as the latest viral success story: “Niu Lai.” A microbudget animated film made on a budget of roughly $200, “Niu Lai” has a bizarre, dreamlike plot, and production value that would generously look rough for a Nintendo 64 game. And it’s now, thanks to the power or word of mouth and lolcow culture, possibly one of the most profitable films ever made. The story behind the production of “Niu Lai” is the type of scrappy underdog narrative that would be wildly inspiring if the result wasn’t so terrible. The film was directed and written by Xin Yumeng and Sun Lifang,

Over the weekend, I participated in my tried-and-true pastime of throwing back a few beers and disagreeing with people on the internet. I typically reserve my film and TV takes for work hours, but between clips debating the merits of Perez Hilton’s humanity and the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy, a handful of vertical film reviews got me crawling the comments. The first time I saw the term “indie slop,” I resisted the Streisand effect, clocked it, and moved on. But after spotting the phrase at least a dozen times since (it’s particularly cruel to witness in the context of Kickstarter campaigns), I turned insult into investigation. “Indie slop” is nowhere near as common an accusation as the classic “AI slop” getting slung around these days. But broadly speaking, it does carry the same sense of poisonous wholesale dismissal. If “AI slop” implies that a machine produced something

If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, Variety may receive an affiliate commission. Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey” is finally setting sail for home theaters. The blockbuster adaptation of Homer’s epic poem will be available to rent and purchase on digital beginning Nov. 17, following its theatrical debut on July 17. The film is also slated to arrive on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray the same day. The digital release comes four months after Nolan’s nearly three-hour epic opened exclusively in theaters, marking a substantially longer theatrical window than most major studio releases. Nolan and Universal took a similar approach with “Oppenheimer,” which spent 123 days in theaters before arriving on premium video-on-demand and physical media in November 2023. The film has earned roughly $1.35 billion worldwide, making it Nolan’s highest-grossing movie and, as of this week, the highest-grossing R-rated film of all time, surpassing “Deadpool & Wolverine.

It’s always a challenge — and an increasingly common one in Hollywood — to go somewhere to shoot film or TV and need to disguise that place so it can double for somewhere else: New York standing in for Ohio (and vice versa), Cape Town for Los Angeles, Budapest for everywhere else. Especially as he was still trapped in the Void of post-production on “Thunderbolts*,” director Jake Schreier was grateful that the Seoul locations he looked at for the final episodes of “Beef” Season 2 could just be themselves. Schreier, series showrunner and creator Lee Sung Jin, and the “Beef” locations team did a small marathon of scouting around Seoul on weekends when Schreier could get out of the MCU edit bay, and it contributed to the creative development of the final act of the season, wherein our heroes* who’ve worked at a “White Lotus” type country club in California, now owned by Youn Yuh-jung,

Shaquille O’Neal will not be appearing in December’s “Avengers: Doomsday,” or any other “Avengers” film, for that matter. In an interview with Variety about his “Dunkman” league, the first professional dunking league where contestants from around the world compete for a grand prize of $500,000 — whose finals is airing the night of Aug. 25 on TNT — the NBA legend dished on his struggle to land roles in Hollywood where he doesn’t play himself. “I would love to do more action roles but we were told by top Hollywood executives that I’m too big, and what they mean by that is when I pop up on the screen everyone will go, ‘Oh, that’s Shaq!’ So, if I’m trying to play a doctor or anything, my character won’t be believable,” O’Neal explained. While O’Neal, 54, portrayed a DC superhero in 1997’s “Steel,” he says he’s spent